I ran a Russian Erlang community site for years, I know pretty much everything there is to know about what's happening in Erlang space. I also worked with Erlang professionally.
Despite Erlang's and Erlang community's claims to how good the language is, it is not that good.
While Erlang (and it's community) where telling everyone how far ahead in the future it is, other languages and platforms (especially JVM) have caught up to it, and moved way past it.
It's nearly impossible to implement anything on par with Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, <countless other distributed frameworks/tools/libraries etc.> in Erlang because for every little thing you can think of you need to build it from scratch. Even Erlang's claim "build massively scalable distributed apps" is a sham: out of the box it cannot handle more that ~80-10-ish nodes[1]. In today's world Java (and Go, increasingly) trumps Erlang in nearly every aspect and claim Erlang might have.
There are so few and far in between systems that use Erlang under the hood that it leads me to believe they are mostly flukes and isolated tales of success than proofs/representations of the language's strength.
Our website runs on 75 nodes, with geolocated microservices, distributed database access, log aggregation, metrics, parallel deploys, etc. etc. etc. It's a huge overkill, and we're gonna scale it down :) But it was just so easy to do it. All in Python, Java, and PHP (!).
In all of Erlang's ecosystem you couldn't find a collection of tools that let you do 10% of that. And you would have to start with writing your own distribution layer on top of Erlang to handle those 75 nodes in three geographical regions.
If you have been using Erlang professionally and you have been running a Russian Erlang forum I wonder why you keep mixing up Erlang ´the language´ and OTP, BEAM and the ecosystem. They are not the same thing, and Erlang the language does not make any of the claims you are ascribing to it. Nor does the Erlang community, which is not nearly as visible as most of the other online language communities because it is just people getting their work done instead of hanging out in fora and trying to hijack the discussion about how everybody should switch to Erlang tomorrow because it is ´the next big thing´. Rather the opposite.
Anyway, it looks as if you have made up your mind and no matter what examples I put forward you have your reasons for ignoring them so thank you for the exchange.
> Erlang the language does not make any of the claims you are ascribing to it
Let's head on to erlang.org, shall we?
"Build massively scalable soft real-time systems... Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability... OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems."
Despite Erlang's and Erlang community's claims to how good the language is, it is not that good.
While Erlang (and it's community) where telling everyone how far ahead in the future it is, other languages and platforms (especially JVM) have caught up to it, and moved way past it.
It's nearly impossible to implement anything on par with Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, <countless other distributed frameworks/tools/libraries etc.> in Erlang because for every little thing you can think of you need to build it from scratch. Even Erlang's claim "build massively scalable distributed apps" is a sham: out of the box it cannot handle more that ~80-10-ish nodes[1]. In today's world Java (and Go, increasingly) trumps Erlang in nearly every aspect and claim Erlang might have.
There are so few and far in between systems that use Erlang under the hood that it leads me to believe they are mostly flukes and isolated tales of success than proofs/representations of the language's strength.
[1] For reference, see RELEASE project. Also, http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~amirg/publications/DE-Bench.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07234.pdf etc.
Our website runs on 75 nodes, with geolocated microservices, distributed database access, log aggregation, metrics, parallel deploys, etc. etc. etc. It's a huge overkill, and we're gonna scale it down :) But it was just so easy to do it. All in Python, Java, and PHP (!).
In all of Erlang's ecosystem you couldn't find a collection of tools that let you do 10% of that. And you would have to start with writing your own distribution layer on top of Erlang to handle those 75 nodes in three geographical regions.